Scott Trigg

Scott Trigg received his Ph.D. in History & History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. He is an historian of science and religion in the premodern Islamic world and his dissertation was titled "From Samarqand to Istanbul: Astronomy and Scientific Education in the Commentaries of Fatḥallāh al-Shirwānī."

His interests include the history of astronomy and its interactions with other disciplines (natural philosophy, theology, optics), education in Islamic societies, translation and cross-cultural transmission of knowledge, the Global Middle Ages, and narratives of medievalism and modernity. His most recent article “Optics and Geography in the Astronomical Commentaries of Fatḥallāh al-Shirwānī” appeared in A.C.S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız’s (eds.) Literature and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-century Anatolia (2016).

While at Notre Dame, he plans to work on an interdisciplinary project titled Astronomy and Theology in the post-Classical Islamic commentary tradition in which he will “explore debates and crucial developments in astronomy and related sciences within a tradition of textual commentaries, asking what made commentaries the preferred genre for Islamic scholars and how the genre constrained or enabled particular ways of conceptualizing and transmitting ideas about nature, perception, demonstration, experiment, and knowledge of God’s creation.”

In Fall 2017 he is teaching the HPS graduate survey "History of Science, Technology, and Medicine to 1750" as well as "Scientific Inquiry: Theories and Practices" for the undergraduate Program of Liberal Studies.